This week, President Obama made several recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But here’s the catch: The Senate was in session, not in recess. As Heritage’s Todd Gaziano and Edwin Meese argue, President Obama’s unilateral determination that the Senate’s pro forma sessions were not real undermines the separation of powers. This is the opportunity to remember what the separation of powers is and why it matters. The principle of separation of powers states that the executive, legislative, and judiciary powers of government …
Last week President Barack Obama’s most recently minted czar, Special Advisor to the President for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Elizabeth Warren, spoke to 400 bankers at the swanky Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, DC. Her message, according to The Washington Post: “Behave, play nice, and we’ll get along just fine.” Specifically, Warren promised to take a more “principles-based approach” to regulation, rather than clearly articulating “thou shalt not” rules that banks could rely on. For this Progressive White House, an enlightened expert, like Warren, given broad new powers by …
Late this Saturday night President Barack Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Van Jones, resigned amid what the Washington Post calls another “lapse in the administration’s vetting procedures.” That’s putting it mildly. Jones is an admitted former communist and black nationalist. His Ella Baker Center for Human Rights produced a rap record in 2005 “hosted by” cop killer Mumia Abu Jamal, in which Jones links the Palestinian fight against Israel as part of the “global struggle against the U.S. led security apparatus” that “we need to see …
